Whether it's a bubble depends on pricing. Is it worth the price, is it worth the future price, and by how much?
In the case of AI coding, yes: AI does exceptionally well at search (something we have known for quite some time, and have a variety of ML solutions for).
Large codebases have search and understanding as top problems. Your ability to make horizontal changes degrades as teams scale. Most stability, performance, quality, etc., changes are are horizontal.
Ironically, I think it's possible that AI's effectiveness at broad search give software engineers additional effectiveness, by being their eyes. Yes, I still review every claude code PR I submit, and yes, I typically take longer to create a claude code PR than a manual one. But I can be more satisfied that the parallel async search agents and massive grep commands are searching more locations, more quickly, and more thoroughly than I would.
Yes, it probably is a bubble (overvalued). No, that doesn't mean it's going to go away. The market is simply overcorrecting as it determines how to price it. Which--net net, is a positive effect, as it encourages economic growth within a developing sector.
Bubble is also not the most important concern--it's rather a concern that the bubble is in the one industry that's not in the red. More important to worry about are other economic conditions outside of AI and tech, which are causing general instability and uncertainty rather than investor appetite. Market recalibrating on a developing industry is fine, as long as it's not your only export.
I like it. This post is the perfect level of detail for people obsessed about UX minutiae.
Personally, I'm not a huge Vercel fan (IMO: lots of hype, business model encourages developer ecosystem lock-in), but this post gave me more trust in the design/UX care that goes into their products (which is a core Vercel strength).
You accumulate web frameworks and maintainers similar to the winning strategy at Monopoly, until you have implicit control over entire ecosystems. Whether you actually seize that control or not doesn’t even matter, because you are in a position to do so—by strategic neglect, or increased attention to whatever project supports your current business goals best.
No single entity should have that much power, especially no venture-capital backed one.
You might want to look at the comments in this thread [1], to get a feeling of the "accusations", as you want to call it... I'm not "accusing" anything, I really couldn't care less, I don't use Vercel/Next.js and never will, but maybe you should read the linked thread, too see how people (at least on HN) see your company.
I think the fact that OpenNext can exist speaks to the opposite
A Next.js project can be deployed to a Docker image very easily [1]. If you want to use a provider that has their own infrastructure setup, then yes you need to do some work (that OpenNext does for you). But that's true of practically any framework deploying to a host that does more than just serve the docker container.
